Salman Rushdie once wrote that a poet’s task is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments". It is a creed he has lived—often at mortal cost. Which is why his recent pronouncement about Hinduism being his great contemporary fear lands with an irony so rich it practically demands footnotes.

Here is a man who spent thirty-three years outrunning clerical vengeance, only to announce—after losing an eye to a fanatical knife in 2022—that his real worry is today’s India. It is a little like a shipwreck survivor, rescued from a storm, solemnly declaring that he now fears the hotel swimming pool.

One would imagine that Rushdie, of all people, understands the geography of danger. He has lived through a global convulsion unleashed by The Satanic Verses: over twenty countries banning the book; clerics treating fatwas like festival flyers; riots across the Muslim world; bookshops attacked; translators stabbed, and in the case of Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered. The press chronicled the grim path of that violence—an Italian translator knifed in his Milan flat, a Japanese academic butchered at his office, publishers living under guard. This wasn’t metaphorical blood. It was literal, and it flowed for decades.

And then there was Iran’s awkward diplomatic two-step in 1998. Tehran reportedly tried signalling its desire to “mend" relations with Britain by distancing itself from the fatwa, but the assassin class did not receive this memo. Fanaticism, unlike bureaucracy, does not run on press releases. In 1990, Rushdie........

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